The Rise and Fall of a Companion Robot
Lessons learned from Pleo

John R. Sosoka
previously with Ugobe, now with Vita Robotica

Throughout history we humans have longed to breathe life into inanimate matter -- to design our own companions. Technology and the arts now afford us the opportunity to start experimenting with this idea. While we're still a long, long way from Pygmalion or the Tyrell Corporation it is an exciting and intriguing experiment. Pleo is an autonomous robotic dinosaur developed and marketed by Ugobe. This talk explores the idea of companion robots, the huge technical and business challenges faced in building Pleo, what worked -- and what failed spectacularly!

Pleo Rising from the ashes

June 9, 2009. Pleo has not been orphaned. See Pleo Robot Dinosaur Back From Extinction on Slashdot.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

John Sosoka is a serial entrepreneur, multiple patent holder and designer with many award winning products to his credit. He was CTO and head of development at software publisher Davidson & Associates (MathBlaster/Blizzard).
John co-founded Neurosmith to bring exploratory, child directed learning into the tactile, physical world. During this time John worked with Lego to lead the design of a line of music-based products.

At Ugobe, John lead the team that developed Pleo, a character-based companion robot.

Before Ugobe's recent Chapter 7 filing, John was Co-founder, CTO and head of R&D at Ugobe.
John is now slaving away at the stealth mode start up Vita Robotica.

Contact information:

John R. Sosoka
john@vitarobotica.com